Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 22, No. 2 (2025)
Looking Back to Get Ahead: Student Need and Social Justice in the Writing Center
Tyler Sehnal
New Mexico State University
tsehnal@nmsu.edu
Abstract
In the last decade, writing center studies has shifted to proposing more radical approaches to tutoring praxes in the hopes of more aggressively challenging the normativity and institutional hegemony of Standard American English (SAE). While well-intentioned and ostensibly conceptualized as “student-centered,” these approaches often fail to acknowledge how radical approaches to writing center (WC) praxes often contend with students’ reliance on directive and assimilationist tutoring, a dependence fostered by the pervasive, institutional hegemony of SAE. As such, drawing on personal experience and contemporary writing center theory, I argue that we should look back to scholarship from beyond the last 5-10 years to guide us as we move forward in the fight to challenge the linguistic hegemony of SAE and institutional linguistic oppression. To that end, this article also offers some suggestions for how we might proceed in a more nuanced pursuit of some of the field’s loftier social justice aims, based on concepts offered by authors like Esters, Geller et al., Diab et al., and others.
Introduction
For decades, the field of writing center studies has sought to undermine the normativity and institutional hegemony of Standard American English (SAE)—and for good reason. After all, the broader university environments that writing centers inhabit and histories of composition in the United States have, for centuries, been invested in the pursuit of power, dominance, and the preservation of white supremacy (Kynard). By way of assimilationist pedagogies and the marginalization of peripheralized forms of English and linguistic habits, universities in the United States have effectively eliminated the idiosyncrasy of language and affirmed the hegemony of SAE. This suggests to students that developing a proficiency in SAE is imperative to ensuring their success as they navigate the university and institutions beyond it. As such, students often conceptualize writing centers as spaces of assimilation and for correcting deficiencies, hoping to participate in directive tutoring sessions or receive counseling on how to improve their proficiency in SAE (Bräuer).
Nancy Effinger Wilson defines Standard American English as an arbitrary, socially constructed concept that generally refers to the “privileged language of middle-class European Americans” (185). SAE’s long-standing association with academic discourse has historically encouraged discriminatory attitudes toward African American Language (AAL) and other peripheralized Englishes (Wilson 182), contributing to their conceptualization as “deficit.” This conceptualization often promotes problematic associations between peripheralized language habits and disability, negatively contrasting the sociocultural factors that influence language habits with the white heteronormativity foundational to SAE.
The hegemony of SAE and white supremacy, and the ableist attitudes that often accompany them, is pervasive. Not only does it manifest in classrooms across universities, in office hours, and peer study sessions, but in “annual assessments, course and instructor evaluations, adjunct labor… tenure and promotion protocols” (Craig 146). Not even writing centers, which are often conceptualized as a last line of defense for students against institutionalized linguistic hegemony, are immune to the pervasiveness of white supremacy. Research has shown that writing center tutors often align themselves with common institutional biases toward “non-academic” discourses (Melzer) and feign ignorance of the roles that white supremacy and racism play in institutional conceptualizations of language and the privileging of SAE (Kern). White supremacy’s pervasiveness is not only responsible for the continued valorization of SAE and the marginalization of other peripheralized forms of English and linguistic habits, but also conceptualizes the concept of truth in general as an extension and “possession of whiteness” (Pham).
Frustrated by the stubbornness of institutionalized linguistic hegemony, writing center studies scholars, consultants, and directors have recently shifted to developing more radical approaches to revising their praxes. Specifically, in the last decade, scholars have dedicated several presentations, journal editions, and edited collections to theorizing radical anti-racist, decolonial, or other socially just approaches to writing center praxes aiming to aggressively challenge the institutional linguistic hegemony of SAE. Many of these approaches are informed by existing anti-racist and decolonial approaches to composition studies put forth by Baker-Bell, Young, Sohan, and others who generally argue that “the belief that there is a homogenous, standard, one-size-fits-all language is a myth that normalizes white ways of speaking English and is used to justify linguistic discrimination on the basis of race” (Baker-Bell 99). Writing center scholars as such have theorized anti-racist, decolonial, and other socially just approaches to writing center praxes that encourage tutors to rethink the use of directive behaviors, reevaluate tutor-tutee and peer-to-peer hierarchies, better promote student agency, and even physically reconfigure writing center spaces to promote equity and be more “authentically welcoming” (Camarillo), among other ideas.
Despite often being posited as “student-centered,” however, many of these approaches neglect to consider conceptualizations students often have of writing centers as well as their conceptualizations of what writing is and does. These conceptualizations are often informed by the discriminatory and marginalizing attitudes of the broader institutions they are a part of, meaning that students often visit writing centers with already deeply internalized prejudices or stigmas towards “non-normative” or peripheralized Englishes. With this in mind, in this article, I argue that the field of writing center studies would be well-served by looking back as it moves forward in the pursuit of undermining the institutional hegemony of SAE and associated institutional linguistic prejudice and oppression. In other words, I claim that contemporary writing center scholars and practitioners aiming to dismantle the linguistic hegemony of SAE would be well-served by drawing from scholarship from nearly two decades ago, looking to literature that presents a clear cognizance of the contentions that often arise between radical writing center praxes and student conceptualizations of the writing center and of what writing is and does.
I also gesture toward scholarship that explicitly acknowledges the often-incremental work of decolonizing academic writing centers and undoing the harm of the assimilationist models of English education common in the United States. By looking back and drawing inspiration from these more nuanced approaches to dismantling linguistic hegemony and colonizing ideologies in academic writing centers, I argue that scholars will be better positioned to address the stubbornness of institutionalized linguistic hegemony and the slow but steady progress in undermining institutionalized linguistic oppression (Diab et al.). As of now, this difficult work has frustrated the field and pushed it into more contentious, radical territory—one that is ultimately counterproductive to (and has stagnated the pursuit of) several of the field’s most ambitious social justice aims.
I open by providing an overview and critique of current literature theorizing radical revisions to writing center praxes. I note how these revisions imply specific conceptualizations of writing centers and of writing, which are not always reflective of students’ actual conceptualizations of writing centers and of what writing is and does, especially students whose conceptualizations have been influenced by broader institutional linguistic prejudices. Next, I reference my own experiences working with students in a writing center situated in a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) and contemporary scholarship presenting demographic and qualitative data collected from writing center users to establish contentions between student perceptions and radical writing center praxes. Finally, I draw from older writing center scholarship that is more cognizant of the contentions that often arise between radical writing center praxes and student conceptualizations of the writing center and of what writing is and does to offer specific suggestions for how the field and practitioners might proceed in their pursuit of undermining the institutional hegemony of SAE and associated institutional linguistic prejudice and oppression.
Review of Current Literature
As I mentioned previously, writing center scholarship published in the last decade has taken a discernibly more radical approach to theorizing writing center praxes for the sake of more aggressively challenging the normativity and institutional hegemony of Standard American English (SAE). This is not to say that writing center scholarship or theory has never been read or marketed as “radical,” but rather that the use of the term “radical” has become much more commonplace and centralized in popular writing center scholarship in the last 5-10 years. Consider Laura Greenfield’s Radical Writing Center Praxis: A Paradigm for Ethical Political Engagement, published in 2019, or when Romeo García and Anna Sicari wrote in the introduction to volume 19, issue 1 of the writing center journal Praxis (published in 2022) that:
we—the writing center community—are aware of ways in which the writing center can be a space of intervention, despite its haunted beginnings and entanglements… it is clear there needs to be a radical shift in how we talk with one another, and how we learn from one another. (1-2)
Like-minded contemporary writing center scholarship also envisions radical effects for the sort of revisions proposed by Greenfield and others, often conceptualizing the radical praxes I describe below as capable of “completely transform[ing] the field” (Greenfield 58) and engendering change beyond writing center studies, facilitating “structural changes in society, disciplines, and the institution itself” (Coenen et al. 18). Such aspirations are at best overly optimistic and at worst pretentious.
The “radical” approaches Greenfield and others describe take multiple forms, challenging writing center scholars and practitioners to rethink the use of directive behaviors in the writing center, reevaluate tutor-tutee and peer-to-peer hierarchies, better promote student agency, and even physically reconfigure writing center spaces to amplify equitability. To reiterate, the aim of the article, and this section in particular, is not to suggest that these theories do not possess any merit. Rather, my goal is to emphasize how the development of more aggressive and “radical” writing center praxes can actually be counterproductive to the field’s pursuit of its intended social justice aims. Specifically, I aim to identify how these radical praxes fail to account for students’ actual conceptualizations of writing centers and of what writing is and does as well as their consistent dependence on writing centers to provide directive, assimilationist tutoring sessions or counseling on how to succeed in contexts in which SAE is conceptualized as standard.
The idea that writing center tutors should avoid providing directive feedback to keep from perpetuating the same institutional hierarchies that position marginalized forms of English and linguistic habits as deficit has persisted in writing center scholarship for decades (Carino). However, contemporary radical anti-racist and decolonial approaches to tutoring and reconfiguring the relationship between writing center tutors and tutees take things a step further. Alongside facilitative and noninterventionist tutoring, authors like Wang, Feibush, and Vue & Wongwai encourage tutors to engage in practices that directly challenge linguistic hegemony and tutees’ preconceived conceptualizations of SAE as superior to peripheralized Englishes or other “non-normative” linguistic habits. These practices include counterstorying, “a CRT tactic… that maps knowledge from the margins in order to understand the ways the functioning of racism in society… a method of telling the stories of those people whose experiences are not often told” (Wang 50), embodied listening behaviors like eye contact, posture, and other nonverbal communication (also known as gestural listening) (Feibush), and introspective self-criticism on the part of (namely white) tutors (Vue & Wongwai).
Practices that encourage tutors to directly communicate to tutees the problematic nature of linguistic hegemony and institutional privileging of SAE—like counterstorying, gestural listening, introspective self-criticism, and maintaining a “mindful resistance” to writing centers’ “historical role in gatekeeping and assimilating” for the broader institutions they inhabit (Coenen et al. 14) aim to empower tutees, particularly multilingual students or students who speak marginalized forms of English or practice peripheralized or even nonverbal linguistic habits. These practices more specifically amplify the agency of tutees by acknowledging their ability “to produce and change language in his or her everyday local practice” (Sohan 193) and by challenging tutees to reconsider the often institutionalized equation of “differences” in writing to “error” (Olson 2). In a similar vein, Eric Camarillo encourages tutors and writing center directors to address the “panoptic,” oppressive, hierarchical structure of the university and writing centers head-on by reconfiguring physical writing center spaces to improve equity and create more “authentically welcoming” spaces. Camarillo argues that adopting a less panoptic structure not only makes students aware of “the institutional and cultural forces that act upon [them], writing centers, and writing center workers,” but also makes it easier to “manipulate [these spaces], change them, to suit our purposes.”
The theoretical approaches proposed by Feibush, Wang, and others represent positive attempts to achieve some of the field’s most ambitious aims. Any writing center scholar, director, and even the consultants most reluctant to embrace a “willingness to be disturbed” or “articulate their commitments” to social justice—sometimes in spite of their own positionalities or relationships to colonialism and white linguistic hegemony (Diab et al. 28)—will tell you that limiting the perpetuation of problematic institutional power dynamics and amplifying tutee agency in writing centers are noble goals and well worth pursuing. However, while primarily conceptualized as “student-centered,” the sort of approaches emphasized above, and the direct, agenda-pushing they require, are often in direct contention with student conceptualizations of the writing center and of what writing is and does, conceptualizations—as I’ve mentioned—that are often informed by the discriminatory and marginalizing attitudes of the broader institutions of which students (and writing centers) are a part of. These contentious conceptualizations are described in detail below.
Recentering Student Need
I’d like to reiterate one more time that there is nothing inherently wrong with rethinking the use of directive behaviors in the writing center, reevaluating tutor-tutee and peer-to-peer hierarchies, promoting student agency, or reconfiguring writing center spaces to amplify equitability. These are important pursuits, especially in the grand scheme of the field’s broader social justice aims. The problem itself lies in approaches that unrealistically emphasize the impact that these sorts of practices can have on the broader field and institutions as well as those that fail to account for student preconceptions of writing centers. To put it simply, scholarship and my own experiences working in writing centers has proven that students who come to the writing center from institutions valorizing SAE don’t expect—or often want—noninterventionist tutoring, counterstorying, or informal lectures on how their instructors’ linguistic ideologies are problematic or that the institutional hegemony of SAE is an inherently white supremacist concept that needs to be eradicated. Instead, I’ve found that tutees most often visit the writing center aiming to please professors who judge their work against the standards of SAE, effectively reiterating to students that there exists a discernible hierarchy of language and linguistic codes.
Further, research has shown that the most likely visitors to university writing centers across the United States are first-generation (Bond), working-class (Denny et al.), and other students historically excluded from access to higher education, including women and students whose parents had lower levels of educational attainment (Salem). Because these students are likely to have been led to believe that what they should “want” from their education is to be brought to par with “native” or “fluent” English speakers and to achieve a sense of “belonging” at the university (assimilation), these students often expect writing center appointments to “cover more ground, use more directive approaches… include negative language and emotional affect, and focus on global concerns… at more frequent rates” (Bond 161). The pervasive nature of racist attitudes governing language use in the university—attitudes that perpetuate discrimination against (and the marginalization of) peripheralized forms of English and linguistic habits and damaging self-stigmas—also means that students visiting the writing center are likely to request services like “line editing, extensive hands-on direction, or micro-level grammatical instruction” (1), requests driven by the assimilationist and disparaging white supremacist attitudes of the broader institutions they inhabit. Put simply, as Lori Salem explains, “The choice to use the writing center is raced, classed, gendered and shaped by linguistic hierarchies” (161).
As such, as many authors have noted, despite well-intentioned approaches to revising writing center praxes that claim to be student-centered and aim to promote student agency and equity, these radical praxes instead often “frustrate students” (Salem 163). In other words, as I mentioned previously, research shows that most students do not visit the writing center expecting (or wanting) the sort of “agenda pushing” that most of the noninterventionist and other radical praxes named above require. Critiquing radical approaches that encourage facilitative and noninterventionist tutoring methods, Peter Carino explains, “Writing centers can ill afford to pretend power and authority do not exist, given the important responsibility they have for helping students achieve their own authority as writers in a power laden environment such as the university” (113). Likewise, Philip J. Sloan writes that, despite tutors’ penchant to “prioritize process over product, the writer over the writing… grades matter – especially to students” (2). Therefore, how can hardline, “radical” approaches to writing center praxes truly be “student-centered” when students are still visiting writing centers desperately expecting—and often find themselves jaded when they don’t encounter (Palmeri; Delgado & McGill)—the assimilationist tutoring methods that these praxes aim to completely eradicate?
It’s an unfortunate reality that so many students’ perceptions of writing centers and of their own writing are still so heavily curated by institutional biases against peripheralized Englishes and these institutions’ continued tacit valorization of SAE. After all, students deserve to have their linguistic habits validated, their agency encouraged, and to learn to “own [their] own ideas” (Suhr-Sytsma & Brown 45). However, in my own experience working as a writing center consultant and coordinator, I’ve found that the disparaging institutional attitudes that discourage students from celebrating differentiated linguistic habits and conceptualizing themselves as proficient communicators are devastatingly persistent and pervasive. This is especially interesting given that my writing center is situated in a Hispanic-Serving Institution, where most incoming students are multilingual and speak English as a second or even third language. As such, I’ve often found myself identifying the same “disparity between student and tutor interpretations of priorities” (Buck) named above and acquiescing to student requests for critical feedback, line-editing services, and directive feedback meant to help them meet the SAE-based standards for assignments set for them by their instructors.
I could offer several instances of tutoring sessions with undergraduate and graduate students who explained to me that their instructors had singled them out as “clear non-native speakers” or pointed out their “deficiencies” when their writing was held to the often impossibly high “standard” of SAE. And I have just as many stories of students who were disinterested in hearing about how their instructors’ feedback was at worst racist and, at best, misled. Instead, these students “just wanted to get through this assignment”; they wanted me to just tell them how to write “the way their professors wanted them to” so they could get the grade and “move on with their lives.” Fair enough. Like I said, I could offer multiple examples here from my own experience, but you get the point: that radical approaches to writing center praxes that fail to consider students’ internalized linguistic biases are not the answer to undoing the linguistic hegemony of SAE and institutional linguistic oppression. Therefore, instead of offering additional examples from my experience—in which attempting these more radical approaches have left both me and my tutees frustrated—I’ll offer some examples of more nuanced approaches to developing more socially just writing center praxes that both empower students and help them “get on with their lives.” These approaches have guided me through multiple difficult tutoring sessions and also inform the suggestions I offer at the conclusion of this article for how the field might proceed in its continued struggle against institutional linguistic oppression.
Looking Back
The persistence of institutional linguistic hegemony of SAE and instructors’ negative attitudes toward peripheralized Englishes and other “non-normative” communication habits necessitates more nuanced approaches to revising writing center praxes for the sake of encouraging student agency and dismantling the institutional hegemony of SAE while also accounting for students’ needs, which often are as simple as “getting the grade” and, as I mentioned, “moving on with their lives.” While it seems almost nonsensical to look to scholarship from over a decade ago to find solutions when there exists a plentitude of more contemporary approaches to achieving the field’s social justice aims, the field’s recent shift toward more radical approaches to revising writing center praxes necessitates a look back. While much of the scholarship published in the last 5-10 years is informed at least in some way by the scholarship that has preceded it, these more recent approaches lack the appropriate nuance required to effectively balance the field’s ambitious social justice aims with student need and the deeply internalized linguistic biases they carry with them into writing centers every day.
The biggest thing scholarship from the early 2010s has in common—and perhaps its greatest attribute—is that it recognizes that anti-racist and decolonial work is incremental. Diab et al. write that “when teaching writing aims toward racial justice, it is not and cannot be reduced to something that happens in just one moment” (2), while Jason B. Esters explains: “Writing centers can’t be anthropomorphized as metahuman entities with the abilities to help heal emotional wounds, or correct injustices, or produce better writers, or portend racial or gender neutrality” (299). Such assessments of writing centers are tempered—especially when compared to assessments of writing centers’ capabilities offered by more contemporary radical writing center scholarship (which, as I mentioned earlier, are often—at best—overly optimistic). However, just because we recognize that writing centers are not “metahuman entities” or as radically transformative as contemporary scholarship make them out to be doesn’t require us to think more pessimistically about the transformative capabilities of writing centers or their ability to undermine the institutional hegemony of SAE. Instead, it requires us to think more realistically about how to balance educating students on the institutional oppressions they navigate everyday and providing them the tools to do so in ways that don’t simply reaffirm the hegemony and supposed superiority of SAE.
To that end, I suggest we look back to how scholars and writing center practitioners more than 10 years ago practically envisioned writing centers as liberating spaces that “need not be ‘pretty’… [or] have the trivial trappings to which so many in the [Predominantly White Institution] have grown accustomed” (Faison 54), but as welcoming, demarginalizing spaces that encourage (but not force) productive dialogue between tutors and their tutees. To me, given my own experiences working as a consultant and coordinator in writing centers, “productive” dialogue refers to that which promotes the agency of tutees—particularly of Black (Baker-Bell), Mexican-American (García), Asian American (Tang), and other students whose linguistic habits are most often marginalized by their instructors and other institutional actors—by helping them develop a critically and culturally contextualized proficiency in dominant discourses that both enables them to satisfactorily complete assignments while remaining cognizant of the situated nature of language and linguistic hegemony.
Helping students develop this contextualized proficiency is easier said than done. Simply put, tutors should aim to engage in discussions with tutees that help them complete their assignments in ways that are satisfactory to instructors subscribed to popular assimilationist models of teaching writing; that is, tutors should help tutees better understand and practice adhering to the conventions of SAE. Simultaneously, however, this dialogue should also encourage tutees to understand that these conventions are uniquely situated and that SAE itself is a learnable literacy, not a standard to which other literacies should be compared. This measured approach not only satisfies students’ most pressing desires (earning a good grade) but also works to affirm students’ existing literacies and abilities and can initiate productive conversations that extend beyond the writing center. For a lot of tutees, simply introducing them to the idea that their unique literacies are valuable and challenging the supposed superiority of SAE is enough to get them thinking more critically about the systemically oppressive and demeaning nature of existing academic language models.
While, again, this work is easier said than done, several authors help provide a helpful foundation for how this work can proceed. As a start, a major part of balancing critique of institutional linguistic hegemony with the sort of pragmatism tutees expect from writing centers is openly acknowledging the contentions between student perceptions of writing centers and of what writing is and does and contemporary writing center praxes that emphasize the promotion of student agency and the dismantling of linguistic hegemony—sometimes at the expense of less “heavy” tutoring sessions or the ability to more quickly get students from “A” to “B” (or, in most cases, from “B” or “C” to “A”). Mullin et al. accomplish this by writing that students visiting writing centers often wonder “why they… [aren’t] taught to ‘succeed’ in their classroom writing,” while faculty experience a “perplex[ity] as to why writing centers [won’t] support ‘correct’ use of language” (151). With this in mind, Mullin et al. propose an “Import/Export” model where tutors learn or “import” knowledge about students’ writing, rather than simply “export” their extant knowledge, arguing that:
The infusion into writing centers of this way of being, when combined with research on and experience with multilingual/nonstandard U.S. speakers of English, can promote a shift in identity for a meadow: rather than operating on margins, playing tricks on the environment, or separating themselves as unique habitats, writing centers might find this historical moment one in which they can openly advocate not for merely maintaining the status quo but for widening access to the growth of communicative possibilities. (165)
In practice, an “import/export” model enables tutors to still “export” extant knowledge of the conventions of SAE or other “academic” writing, while generally taking a non-directive approach that encourages tutees to identify key similarities and differences between SAE and their own, situated literacies. This model, then, is particularly useful for helping tutees develop the contextualized proficiency in SAE that I call for above—one that situates SAE alongside, rather than above, tutees’ existing literacies. In other words, this approach subtly encourages (particularly multilingual) tutees to engage in agency-affirming, participatory knowledge building practices in the writing center while simultaneously assuring tutees that their tutors care about their more immediate concerns, like grammar issues, problems with punctuation, or their general compliance with SAE.
Like Mullin et al., Geller et al. and Sytsma and Brown similarly propose more nuanced approaches to writing center pedagogy and tutoring in which tutors openly and more subtly address the “institutional, administrative, and pedagogical implications of taking up race and working at antiracism in and through the writing center” (Geller et al. 103) while also keeping students’ immediate concerns at the forefront of tutoring sessions. Suhr-Sytsma and Brown explain that writing center tutors can begin by raising questions about “linguistic ownership” (44) by asking tutees to interrogate their language use, identifying phrases or terminology that may be problematic, or pointing to places where the language tutees use may not be their own—language they may have included only because their instructors “insisted” they use as part of a “restrictive adherence to dominant discourses” (45). Geller et al. meanwhile call for a “constant, active self-consciousness” that requires tutors and students to “perceive ranges of choices relative to both disciplinary practices and to the performance of racial identity… to articulate various implication and effects of taking one choice over and against the others” (121). In either case, both authors propose interrogative behaviors that don’t take precedence over tutees’ anxieties, but instead encourage the development of the sort of critically and culturally contextualized proficiency in dominant discourses that I describe above—one that conceptualizes SAE not as standard, but as a situated literacy capable of co-existing alongside traditionally peripheralized languages and linguistic habits.
Sensing a theme? Much of the scholarship described above attempts to move tutors and directors toward presenting socially just tutoring as a difficult, nuanced process that often requires tutors to conceptualize the relationship between performance of racial and linguistic identity and adherence to disciplinary standards as a sort of compromise (i.e., tutees may choose to prioritize the coherency of their own writerly “voice” over the constraints of an assignment, or vise-versa). A compromise, as I’ve suggested, is not ideal, especially according to contemporary radical writing center scholarship or in the grand scheme of the field’s broader, ongoing fight against the institutional hegemony of SAE. However, as I’ve tried to argue throughout this article, conceptualizing liberatory writing center praxes and meeting students’ more immediate needs as a compromise is the most effective way to initiate discussions capable of undermining the hegemony of SAE while also ensuring tutees that their grammatical or SAE-compliance concerns are valid and will be addressed. Again, it is the pervasive nature of white supremacy that necessitates this way of thinking, that requires us to reconsider how we challenge the institutional hegemony of SAE in our conversations with students. As I will argue below, however, reconceptualizing this relationship as a compromise does not indicate a step back or a “giving up” in the field’s pursuit of dismantling linguistic hegemony, but rather a way of guaranteeing a more tangible—albeit incremental—progress in this pursuit, especially when doing so offers practitioners and directors more accessible strategies for helping their tutees develop more critically and culturally contextualized proficiencies in dominant discourses.
Suggestions
The first of three suggestions I offer is this: as writing center directors, coordinators, and consultants, we must continue to ask questions of our tutees. Questions we might ask include: “Why did you word this sentence this way?” or “What were you trying to convey in this paragraph?” Raising questions, as Suhr-Sytsma and Brown note, is a great, innocuous way of prompting the sort of discussions that can get students thinking about their own linguistic habits and the validity of these habits. After all, in my experience, I’ve found that many students don’t ever get the chance to explain their process or writing style to their professors, especially in settings as intimate as those they often share with their writing center tutors. Giving students the space to talk through their decisions, in addition to providing tutors a chance to validate tutees’ often marginalized communication styles, also gives tutees the chance to express and relieve their frustrations. While working with a student working on their master’s thesis, for instance, I found that simply uttering the phrase “I see what you’re trying to do here” was enough to relieve some of the tension and budding defeatist attitudes my tutee was experiencing after working solely with his thesis chair, who was often quick to equate his “mistakes” to his status as a “non-native” English speaker.
In a similar vein, I recommend also further encouraging tutees’ agency by suggesting to them that they approach their instructors directly to ask questions about assignments or feedback they’ve received. Again, in my experience, many tutees, including graduate students, have never even considered the possibility of approaching their instructors to ask the sorts of questions they’ve asked me or other tutors. This can be due to a variety of factors, but often occurs because institutional power structures intimidate or dissuade students from approaching their instructors for fear of challenging established classroom or institutional hierarchies (Delgado and McGill). Additionally, taking the role of the tutor a step further, I recommend also suggesting to students that you serve as an advocate on their behalf, volunteering to speak with instructors or seek clarification from instructors for them. Keep in mind, however, that receiving the consent of your tutees to approach or contact their instructors is paramount, as many students often fear academic or other repercussions of “challenging” their instructors’ authority. International students especially often fear that their visas may be revoked if they infringe on the authority of their instructors or other institutional actors. However, at least suggesting to students that you are “in their corner” by volunteering to advocate on their behalf can often be a welcome first step in initiating productive dialogue that may aid in the destabilization of the institutional hegemony of SAE in the minds of students.
Finally, I also recommend advertising other institutional resources to tutees that can aid them in securing the support they need as they navigate potentially problematic power dynamics between themselves and their instructors or other institutional actors. Among these might include resources for students with disabilities, student programs like Black, Indian, or Asian-American student groups, or other support systems for students whose linguistic or communication habits are most likely to be marginalized. I stress that tutors themselves must learn how these resources and systems operate so that they can be better advocates for tutees, especially since many of these systems—including disability access and related services—often present their own, unique institutional systems that students may also struggle to navigate on their own. By providing tutees informed access to these resources, tutors can help build a network between writing centers and other programs and resources already engaging in similar work and discussions aimed at undermining and dismantling the institutional hegemony of SAE and white supremacy, alleviating tutees’ fears—which I have encountered often—that they’re in this fight against linguistic and other institutional oppressions alone.
Conclusion
As I’ve discussed, writing center studies has shifted in the last decade to proposing more radical approaches to tutoring praxes in the hopes of challenging the normativity and institutional hegemony of SAE. While these approaches are well-intentioned and typically conceptualized as “student-centered,” they often fail to acknowledge the pervasive nature of SAE, and, by extension, how radical approaches to WC praxes often contend with students’ reliance on directive and assimilationist tutoring, a dependence fostered by the institutional hegemony of SAE. To support my claims, I’ve critiqued multiple contemporary “radical” approaches to revising writing center praxes—approaches that typically offer drastic suggestions for achieving the field’s social justice aims, require uncomfortable agenda-pushing, and envision grandiose effects of these approaches in practice. I’ve also offered scholarship that presents data suggesting that tutees rarely visit writing centers expecting the sort of agenda pushing required of most of the noninterventionist and other radical praxes I named previously.
With this in mind, I offered some suggestions to help guide the field forward, based on the readings named in the previous section and further examples from my own experience as a writing center consultant and coordinator. Each of these suggestions is grounded in the premise that uncovering ways for students to develop more critically and culturally contextualized proficiencies in dominant discourses is the most realistic—and thereby effective—way for the field to proceed in the pursuit of some of its most ambitious social justice aims. However, it’s also worth noting that modern writing center studies doesn’t completely neglect the approaches that have preceded the more contemporary, radical approaches I’ve critiqued throughout this article: Basta and Smith call for a rhetorical and critical approach that asks tutors to make tutees aware of the “linguistic options available to them, an approach that “moves away from the universalist correct/incorrect methodology to an approach in which students can negotiate multiple discourses and practice their agency” (62). Likewise, Laura Greenfield acknowledges:
not every institution will be supportive of [radical revisions to existing] educational models… and not all students will be receptive to the radical questions [educators and practitioners] pose. [Writing center] directors will need to continue to be savvy in negotiating their practices in light of specific institutional contexts and stakes. (147)
Still, the question persists: how can writing center directors, coordinators, and consultants be “savvy” in ways that support the development of more critically and culturally contextualized proficiencies in dominant discourses for their tutees, especially for those whose linguistic habits are most often marginalized by the institutions they inhabit?
The ideas I propose are not perfect and likely will not be effective in every institutional context, especially in those that lack adequate resources for tutors and tutees looking to build networks of support for marginalized students. However, they do offer some paths forward as the field surges ahead in its pursuit of undermining the linguistic hegemony of SAE and dismantling the oppressive systems it helps support. Relying on key concepts from older writing center scholarship, these methods and others like them can support the development of more critically and culturally contextualized proficiencies for tutees, an essential step in balancing tutees’ needs with the field’s ambitious social justice aims. This approach has much greater potential for sparking productive discussions beyond the writing center, including across curricular and administrative efforts.
As it stands, most contemporary writing center scholarship appears more concerned with aggressively critiquing existing power structures and the institutional hegemony of SAE, which, while a noble pursuit, has only resulted in greater frustrations for scholars and practitioners and greater alienation of the populations writing centers are most meant to help. After all, what’s the point of a writing center that isn’t truly student-centered? More work needs to be done to maintain writing centers’ reputation for being a much-needed resource for students—both in ways they expect and that they haven’t quite come to recognize… yet.
As I’ve argued, looking back might be our best way forward.
Works Cited
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